Build your Ark – prepare for the GPU VDI flood!

Its been 9 months since we first discussed VDI 2.0 and the evolution of how and why GPU is becoming a necessary piece of a modern VDI environment. If you missed that blog, have a look here to catch up on this exciting transition. There have been many confirmations of this shift over the last several months but none as exciting or enabling as the early access program for vSphere 6 and VMware’s first stab at NVIDIA GRID vGPU. As a refresher, GRID vGPU is what many would consider the “Holy Grail” of GPU and the primary purpose of the NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology. By physically partitioning the GRID cards, you get the best of scalability and performance without the overhead of technology like vSGA or the limited scale of pass through GPU’s.

As you probably know, Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop have supported vGPU for a little over a year. It was amazing to see staunch vSphere environments start to implement XenServer just to get access to the benefits of GRID vGPU. This appears to have caught VMware a little off guard as they are typically the first to enter new innovative spaces with the vSphere hypervisor. As a result of Citrix beating VMware to the punch on GRID vGPU, work on GRID vGPU shot to the top of priorities at VMware. Who wins in this punch/counter punch contest of GRID vGPU? WE ALL WIN! Competition drives innovation and in this case, very timely innovation.

So lets talk about the early access program for vSphere! Oh… I almost forgot – the restrictions on the early access program prevent discussion outside the people that are part of the early access program. So unfortunately there isn’t much we can discuss specifically about the program, but we can discuss its inevitable impact. vSphere is the leading hypervisor, NVIDIA is the leading GPU enabler for VDI and Cisco is the leading enterprise compute platform that just launched the C240 M4 with the latest Intel Haswell E5-2600 v3 series processors. NVIDIA‘s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) is March 17-20 and VMware is indicating that vSphere 6 should be available around then. You couple all of this with some exciting things that Cisco is working on relative to Compute and GPU’s (maybe an announcement at GTC.. J )… the perfect storm is brewing for sure. Learn more about NVIDIA GRID vGPU here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/virtual-gpus.html

2 Comments

I agree these graphics technologies are gaining massive traction as mainstream solutions. Coupling the NVIDIA GPUs with Cisco UCS provides an unmatched performance and reliability. Now we can leverage vGPU with either XenServer or vSphere to get the densities. Cool stuff!